Presently, optical fiber can be mainly divided into two sorts: glass optical fiber and plastic optical fiber. Compared to glass optical fiber, plastic optical fiber has advantages including being flexible but tough, easily mass-produced, inexpensive, convenient to use and light-guiding even when flexed significantly. Optical fiber is primarily used to communicate signals; however, the communicating loss rate of the plastic optical fiber is greater and side light leaking is more serious than for glass optical fiber, so plastic optical fiber has been given to other uses. For example, the light-guiding property of plastic optical fiber can be applied in a visual or monitor lighting device; or the lighting effect of the side light leaking of the plastic optical fiber can be applied in lighting and adorning of objects or staircases, or in optical fiber textiles, in which a portion of the optical fiber cover layer is removed to form a plurality of pits that reach the core of the fiber, and with these pits, the incident light in the fiber leaks from the side wall resulting in a lighting effect.
Typically, the textile or the adornment, in which the light is guided by the optical fiber, has a small illuminant device to provide light. The small illuminant device is mainly composed of optical fibers and a light source. In the assembling, the ends of the optical fibers must be gathered into a hank, and at least one light source and a power supply are set in the rear side of the ends of the optical fibers, in which the light source can be a light-emitting diode (LED), and the power supply can be a cell set or other direct current supply. The light beam emitted from the light source enters the end of the optical fiber hank, and the light is transmitted through the optical fibers. The optical fiber textile or adornment can shine by means of the side light leaking of the optical fiber.
Conventionally, in order to fix the locations of the optical fiber hank and the light source, a heat shrinkable tubing is used to wrap the light source and the optical fiber hank. However, some disadvantages and issues are raised in using the heat shrinkable tubing to fix the optical fiber hank and the light source. The most serious disadvantage is that when the heat shrinkable tubing is excessively shrunk due to improper temperature control during the shrinking process, the projecting angle of the light source is affected and a portion of the light emitted from the light source is blocked from projecting into the illuminant device, such as the optical fiber hank, thereby deteriorating the luminescence of the illuminant device. Furthermore, because the heat shrinkable tubing is made of a soft and plastic material, when an external force is applied to pull the optical fiber hank or the electric wire of the light source, the optical fiber hank or the light source detaches from the heat shrinkable tubing, thereby resulting in a poor fixing effect. In addition, because the heat shrinkable tubing closely adheres to the optical fiber hank and the light source along the shapes thereof, and the shape of the heat shrinkable tubing is indefinite, the shape of the heat shrinkable tubing cannot be designed and modeled according to the actual requirements, causing difficulty in overall application design.